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Elderbloggers Stake Their Claim

PRESCOTT LUSTIG, 84, posts to his Weblog every day or two, writing on the demise of such things as orange crates, or on more serious issues like "the conditions of aging and the challenge of living with those conditions."

Mr. Lustig, a marketing consultant who lives in central Illinois and goes by Pete on his site, named his blog Late Life Crisis (spaces.msn.com/latelife). "If you want the drama of lifestyle crisis, wait until you get to late life," Mr. Lustig wrote in his blog. "That's when things really change -- and adapting becomes a challenge." He and his wife share commentaries on aging, current events and their lives.

With a breadth of experience and perspective, older bloggers are staking out a place in the blogosphere -- a medium overwhelmingly dominated by the young. Perhaps more attentive to grammar and less likely to use cutesy cyberspeak, older bloggers expound on topics as varied as poetry and politics, gardening and grandmothering. According to a recent report by the Perseus Development Corporation, a research company that studies online trends, the Internet is home to approximately 54.3 million blogs, nearly 60 percent written by people younger than 19. Just 0.3 percent of blogs are run by people 50 or older, yet that's still about 160,000 bloggers.

"I'm a big, big advocate of older people blogging," said Ronni Bennett, 65, author of the large and active Time Goes By (timegoesby.net). The "blogroll" on the left-hand side of her site has links to more than 100 blogs written by people 50 and older, many of them 65 and older.

Ms. Bennett, a former television and radio producer who lives in New York, spoke recently on a panel called "Respect Your Elderbloggers" at South by Southwest, an annual arts festival in Austin, Tex. She said that blogging has a lot to offer older people.

Blogging helps keep older minds sharp, offers a platform in which to express views and opens social networks all over the world, Ms. Bennett said.

Mort Reichek, a retired journalist in Monroe Township, N.J., who writes a blog, octogenarian.blogspot.com, has gotten to know a circle of friends, a group as disparate as a Dutch farmer, a retired librarian from Ohio State University and even some conservative evangelical Christians. (Mr. Reichek's political posts are somewhat left of center.)

"I'm 81 years old and this blog has opened up a whole new world to me," Mr. Reichek said. "And I'm not doing this because I'm a lonely old man. I don't lack for social interaction. I find it a fascinating hobby, and a fruitful one."

In one posting, Mr. Reichek wrote about what he thought was the insanity of the Iraq war, which prompted volleys of comments from pro- and antiwar partisans. "There were 14 or 15 people using my blog to have an argument about their positions on the war," he said.

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Still, does all this online activity isolate people from the real world? No, says a recent report called "The Strength of Internet Ties" by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit group that studies the effects of the Web. According to the report, "The Internet is enabling people to maintain existing ties, often to strengthen them and, at times, to forge new ties. The time that most people spend online reduces the time they spend on the relatively unsocial activities of watching TV and sleeping."

Blogging can have an enormous impact on the blogger himself, and perhaps nobody personifies that more than Milt Rebmann, 74, who writes Milt's Muse (milts.blogspot.com), about "existing with incurable cancer and the depression that inevitably results," as its masthead says.

"It's a therapy for me," said Mr. Rebmann, who retired from the electronics business and lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "It's pretty much gotten me out of the depression. I'm not having so many dark thoughts about death as I used to. I can see improvement in my thinking."

Mr. Rebmann also gets something by visiting some of the other bloggers who visit his site. " "It's kind of like talking over the backyard fence," he said. "Like a neighborhood."

While the 65-plus age range is notoriously tech-shy, many say that the blog-hosting companies make it simple to start and maintain one. Mr. Reichek said that when he went to Blogger.com -- which is owned by Google -- the site showed him how to set up a blog in easy steps.